This invention relates to a regenerator checkerwork brick having flow spaces in refractory material to store and recover heat. More particularly, the present invention relates to such a regenerator checkerwork brick having hexagonally-shaped flow spaces disposed in a pattern for uniform and efficient accessibility to the heat storage mass of refractory.
The regenerator checkerwork brick of the present invention is useful for regenerators to extract heat from a fluid medium passing through the flow spaces in the brick in one direction and heat a different fluid medium when passing through the flow spaces in the opposite direction. While the regenerator checkerwork brick is useful for the operation of well known forms of blast furnace stoves, it is especially useful for horizontal regenerators of a blast furnace system such as disclosed in copending application Ser. No. 191,141 assigned to the same Assignee as this invention. In this blast furnace stove system, a recuperator is used for heating a cold air blast in heat exchange tubes with heat from a counter flow of waste products of combustion delivered from one of a plurality of horizontal regenerators. The preheated cold air blast is fed along horizontal flow spaces of highly-heated refractory in one of the regenerations. The resulting hot air blast is then fed to a hot blast main. The horizontal regenerator takes the form of a large cylinder arranged horizontally. This horizontal arrangement of the recuperator offers significant advantages over the older known forms of blast furnace stoves which embody a vertical flow path for combustion gases and an air blast. For either of these blast furnace stove arrangements, a desired efficient use of fuel requires a compact checker structure to provide a storage mass of nearly uniform accessibility for the storage and recovery of heat. The checkerwork should be readily adaptable to a circular configuration of a vessel for maximum density. Heat transfer efficiency of the checkerwork increases, when there is a greater density of checkerbrick surfaces transversely to the flow path for fluid media.